sexual abuse

Most Catholics in Baltimore managed to shrug off the revelations of sexual abuse by the clergy and the cover-ups by the hierarchy. They didn’t read the books, they scanned the newspaper articles and were upset for a few seconds and then stopped reading. The hierarchy made some pretext of stopping the abuse, and then continued its policy of obfuscation and denial.

But the Netflix series “The Keepers” seems finally to have gotten the attention of those who didn’t want to believe how bad things are. The murder of Sister Cathy was entwined with the stories of sexual abuse at Archbishop Keough, a girls’ high school in Baltimore.

As reviewers have noticed, the series is not like other True Crime stories, because this series focuses on the victims, and the victims of sexual abuse by Father Maskell are still alive and can tell their stories.

Germans managed to construct a protective barrier between themselves and the Holocaust until the soap opera “Shoah” pierced that barrier and made the Germans start to come to terms with what their nation had done to the Jews. Perhaps “The Keepers” will do the same for Catholics.

Someone told me that he thought Archbishop Lori of Baltimore is a holy and humble man. I am no judge of his soul, but:

Ryan White, who made the series “The Keepers,“ asked the Archdiocese of Baltimore for its file of the abuser Father Maskell. The Archdiocese of Baltimore (that is, Archbishop Lori) is still refusing to release its file on Maskell, even though making the file public might help solve Sister Cathy’s murder. Its excuse is that the file contains personal information that cannot be legally released:

“Archdiocesan records related to Maskell are confidential, and Archdiocesan policy and state law would preclude us from disclosing much of the information in them as they include confidential personal information (e.g. names of alleged sexual abuse victims), personnel records, health records, attorney-client communications, personally identifying information (such as social security numbers), etc.”

But, of course the personal information could be redacted, that is, blacked out; this is standard procedure in releasing court files.

The second reason the Archdiocese gave for not releasing the file is that the file is confidential, which means that it is not its policy to release the file. That is, the Archdiocese (again, Archbishop Lori) is saying that it is not releasing the file because it does not want to release the file—even though it might help solve a murder.

Perhaps the Archdiocese does not want the murder solved because it fears that Maskell was indeed involved in it. Or perhaps the file simply shows the incompetence and carelessness of the Archdiocese in investigating allegations of sexual abuse. As “The Keepers” shows, incompetence and carelessness were also present in the law enforcement agencies that were supposed to be investigating the abuse. No one really cared much that girls were being abused or that Sister Cathy was murdered. They were just little people, not like state officials or bishops, who are the only people who really matter.

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Because I saw how mercy and forgiveness were misused in cases of clerical sexual abuse, I have been suspicious of Pope Francis’s stress on God’s mercy, which seems to lack an equal stress on justice. My suspicious were justified. Nicole Winfield of the AP reports:

Pope Francis has quietly reduced sanctions against a handful of pedophile priests, applying his vision of a merciful church even to its worst offenders in ways that survivors of abuse and the pope’s own advisers question.

One case has come back to haunt him: An Italian priest who received the pope’s clemency was later convicted by an Italian criminal court for his sex crimes against children as young as 12. The Rev. Mauro Inzoli is now facing a second church trial after new evidence emerged against him, The Associated Press has learned.

The Inzoli case is one of several in which Francis overruled the advice of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and reduced a sentence that called for the priest to be defrocked, two canon lawyers and a church official told AP. Instead, the priests were sentenced to penalties including a lifetime of penance and prayer and removal from public ministry.

In some cases, the priests or their high-ranking friends appealed to Francis for clemency by citing the pope’s own words about mercy in their petitions.

“With all this emphasis on mercy … he is creating the environment for such initiatives,” the church official said, adding that clemency petitions were rarely granted by Pope Benedict XVI, who launched a tough crackdown during his 2005-2013 papacy and defrocked some 800 priests who raped and molested children.

[Greg] Burke said Francis’ emphasis on mercy applied to “even those who are guilty of heinous crimes.” He said priests who abuse are permanently removed from ministry, but are not necessarily dismissed from the clerical state, the church term for laicization or defrocking.

“The Holy Father understands that many victims and survivors can find any sign of mercy in this area difficult,” Burke said. “But he knows that the Gospel message of mercy is ultimately a source of powerful healing and of grace.”

“While mercy is important, justice for all parties is equally important,” Collins said in an email. “If there is seen to be any weakness about proper penalties, then it might well send the wrong message to those who would abuse.”

It can also come back to embarrass the church. Take for example the case of Inzoli, a well-connected Italian priest who was found guilty by the Vatican in 2012 of abusing young boys and ordered defrocked.

Inzoli appealed and in 2014 Francis reduced the penalty to a lifetime of prayer, prohibiting him from celebrating Mass in public or being near children, barring him from his diocese and ordering five years of psychotherapy.

In a statement announcing Francis’ decision to reduce the sentence, Crema Bishop Oscar Cantoni said “no misery is so profound, no sin so terrible that mercy cannot be applied.”

In November, an Italian criminal judge showed little mercy in convicting Inzoli of abusing five children, aged 12-16, and sentencing him to four years, nine months in prison. The judge said Inzoli had a number of other victims but their cases fell outside the statute of limitations.

Inzoli was a leader in Communion and Liberation. He was known as Don Mercedes because he had a taste for that car. He also had a taste for b0ys. Pope Benedict defrocked Inzoli; Francis reinstated him

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As Spotlight intimated, orphans and children from poor and broken families, were especially the target of abusive priests in Boston. The ecclesiastical hierarchy intimidated the families, who thought they were unable to fight the money, power, and influence of the clergy. It was a class conflict of the powerful vs. the powerless.

Here are a few thoughts from Isaiah on the matter:

The haughty eyes of people shall be brought low, and the pride of everyone shall be humbled; and the Lord alone will be exalted in that day. For the Lord of hosts has a day against all that is proud and lofty, against all that is lifted up and high; against all the cedars of Lebanon, lofty and lifted up; and against all the oaks of Bashan; against all the high mountains, and against all the lofty hills; against every high tower, and against every fortified wall; against all the ships of Tarshish, and against all the beautiful craft. The haughtiness of people shall be humbled, and the pride of everyone shall be brought low; and the Lord alone will be exalted on that day.

For Jerusalem has stumbled and Judah has fallen, because their speech and their deeds are against the Lord, defying his glorious presence. The look on their faces bears witness against them; they proclaim their sin like Sodom, they do not hide it. Woe to them! For they have brought evil on themselves.

O my people, your leaders mislead you, and confuse the course of your paths. The Lord rises to argue his case; he stands to judge the peoples. The Lord enters into judgment with the elders and princes of his people: It is you who have devoured the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor? says the Lord God of hosts.

Whoever is left in Zion and remains in Jerusalem will be called holy, everyone who has been recorded for life in Jerusalem, once the Lord has washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion and cleansed the bloodstains of Jerusalem from its midst by a spirit of judgment and by a spirit of burning. Then the Lord will create over the whole site of Mount Zion and over its places of assembly a cloud by day and smoke and the shining of a flaming fire by night. Indeed over all the glory there will be a canopy. It will serve as a pavilion, a shade by day from the heat, and a refuge and a shelter from the storm and rain.

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I saw Spotlight last night. I found the movie sobering, understated, and well-crafted. I did not become deeply involved until March 2002, but as far as I know the film presents matters accurately, especially in its portrayal of the emotional roller coaster that everyone went through.

The reviews have been 99% positive. Here is the summary from Roger Ebert:
Tom McCarthy’s superb “Spotlight,” co-written by McCarthy and Josh Singer, is the story of that investigation. “Spotlight” is a great newspaper movie of the old-school model, calling up not only obvious comparisons with “All the President’s Men” and “Zodiac,” two movies with similar devotion to the sometimes crushingly boring gumshoe part of reportage, but also Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell shouting into adjacent phones in “His Girl Friday.” At a late moment in “Spotlight,” there’s an image of the presses printing off the edition that carries the church abuse story. Such a scene is so de rigueur in newspaper movies that it borders on cliche, but in “Spotlight” it is a moment of intense emotion. The truth in that edition, the evil it describes, will be a wound in the psyche of millions, but it must come out.

The Spotlight team is editor Walter “Robby” Robinson (Michael Keaton), and three reporters, Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), and Matty Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James). John Slattery plays Globe managing deputy editor Ben Bradlee Jr.. All of the reporters are locals, and everyone has some connection to the Catholic Church (referred to as only “The Church”). When a new editor, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), comes on board, he is perceived as an outsider because he’s not from Boston at all (he is first seen boning up on the city by devouring “The Curse of the Bambino.”) In an initial meeting with Robby, Baron brings up a recent piece by a Globe columnist about the Boston archdiocese’s potentially shady handling of various abuse cases. Baron suggests the story could be perfect for the Spotlight team. Robby hesitates, but Baron gently pushes: “This strikes me as an essential story for a local paper.” It’s a great line, and it’s so underplayed by Schreiber that you might miss its effectiveness. This goes for his entire performance. Right before the church-abuse edition goes to print, they all meet in Marty’s office, and he looks through a hard copy of the story, crossing out words, murmuring to himself, “Adjectives.” That is a newspaper man.

Holed up in a cluttered basement office, the Spotlight team exhibit the behavior of people who spend more time with one another than they do with their own families. Personal details about their lives are at a minimum. Sacha goes to church every Sunday with her grandmother, a ritual she finds increasingly painful. Rezendes’ marriage is on the rocks. Matty has a couple of kids, and a big magnet on his refrigerator emblazoned with an American flag and “Remember 9/11” on it. We know who these people are.

At first the team focuses on one former priest, John J. Geoghan, alleged to have molested many children years ago. But Baron urges them to remember that the story is bigger than just one “bad apple” priest. He wants to go after the whole system. The corruption is obviously systemic, but the key issue becomes: did Cardinal Law know? That’s the big game Spotlight is after. “The Curse of the Bambino” may have taught Baron about Red Sox Nation, but a meet-and-greet with Cardinal Law (a creepily sincere Len Cariou) during Baron’s first week on the job is even more illuminating. Baron is stunned at Law’s assumption that theBoston Globe would work with the Catholic Church.

Sacha and Michael question the adult victims willing to come forward, who are so traumatized they can’t find the words to describe what was taken from them. A couple of lawyers (played by Billy Crudup and Stanley Tucci) sit on opposite ends of the spectrum of dealing with the Catholic Church from a legal standpoint.

McCarthy and his entire team, from production designers to location scouts to extras casting directors, get Boston right. Different neighborhoods (Back Bay, Southie) are used as shorthand for entire worlds. There are clear class divides (predator priests often worked in low-income neighborhoods, targeting boys who needed father figures). The atmosphere is very “Boston”: having a beer on the back porch in the dead of winter or arguing about work over hot dogs at Fenway. Boston, with its confusing colonial-era streets and church spires jutting into the sky on practically every corner, is the soul of the movie. “Spotlight” feels local.

“Spotlight” also shows a deeper truth, the level of psychological trauma brought on by abuse, not just to the victims, but to horrified Catholics everywhere. “Spotlight” takes faith seriously. An ex-priest turned psychiatrist is an important source, and when he’s asked how Catholics reconcile the abuse scandal with their faith, he replies, “My faith is in the eternal. I try to separate the two.” Mark Ruffalo modulates his performance over the course of the film at a world-class level, moving from a patient dogged investigator to a rumpled maniac racing through courthouses, chasing down cabs and screaming at his boss. In a raw moment, he confesses to Sacha that even though he stopped going to church years ago, he always assumed that one day he would go back. “I had that in my back pocket,” he says, glancing at her with a flash of anguish. “Spotlight” makes the issue of lost faith visceral by taking the time to let it breathe, letting it play its part in the story.

The newspaper world has changed a lot since 2002. Things look pretty grim. But good long-form journalism still exists (the recent New York Times series about the conditions for nail salon workers is a good example). Such work is as important now as it has ever been. “Spotlight” is the kind of movie where a scene showing a group of reporters huddled over church directories, taking notes in silence, becomes a gripping sequence. (It’s reminiscent of the row of mission control guys in “Apollo 13,” whipping out their slide rules as one, thereby almost single-handedly expanding the concept of heroism.) “Spotlight,” with all its pain and urgency, is a pure celebration of journalists doing what they do best.

Here is my reaction to the film:

All the institutions in Boston failed: the church hierarchy, the laity, the police, even the Globe, which tossed Saviano’s evidence the first time he sent it, even one of the reporters on the Spotlight team, who had not followed up a warning about 20 abusive priests in the archdiocese.

Outside of the time frame of the film, we know that cardinals and popes failed. John Paul II ignored specific and reliable reports of child abuse, and protected the incestuous molester drug addict Maciel. Everyone turned away their faces from the victims.

The film also show the range of emotions that those who were investigating the abuse experienced, and I went through them to. Disgust: reading the El Paso case was like dipping your hand into a septic tank. Disbelief: did a bishop really go into the Mexican desert to hold black masses with his abusive priests? Doubts: victims were suspicious of everyone, including me, and were often emotional wrecks. Obsessiveness: I was working seven days a week, 80-90 hours a week, and would get up at 3 AM to work several hours. Anger. Bitterness. The ruined lives of the victims. The sadness of the lost faith of the reporters.

Here are some thoughts on three matters:

The abusers

Some (many?) were clever psychopaths, who could manipulate victims, their families, the police, the bishops. But others were losers. All of them were interested in both control and sex, treating their victims like marionettes, like toys. Many were immature homosexuals, mamma’s boys, who went into the priesthood because it was free from masculine demands. They were the same emotional age as their victims, and they had many victims because they liked 14 year olds, and boys kept aging out. They all knew they could abuse with few consequences. Perhaps they would be transferred, or sent for a vacation to a treatment center, but nothing worse would happen to them. They were protected. Perhaps 7-10% of priests in the United States had a sexual relationship with a minor, mostly adolescents, mostly males.

Complicity and Enabling

Sipe blames celibacy. He thinks many, perhaps 50%, of priests are having sex, mostly with adults, and this creates an atmosphere of shared sexual secrets which makes everyone reluctant to blow the whistle on abuse. Perhaps. A bigger element was clericalism, which placed the clergy on a pedestal, or at least made them immune from lay supervision. This has a legal ancestor on the privilege of clergy which exempted clerics from harsh medieval justice. In response to Protestantism, the Catholic Church exalted the priesthood far above the laity. In the United States, priests were among the few educated members of an immigrant church.

In Boston, as Spotlight emphasizes, the Catholic Church was like a club. It did good, and also gave people the opportunity to network for many purposes, including business. It was to everyone’s advantage (except the victims’) to pretend that everything was basically OK. If you broke silence, you were eased of the club, lost business, lost contacts, were isolated.

While there are uniquely Catholic, and even Bostonian, tendencies that contributed to the abuse and its toleration, the ultimate reasons go deeper. The Anglicans have had similar problems. Marie Fortune, a religious sociologist, started a journal to deal with abuse – physical, sexual, and emotional – and religion (and it occurs in all religions). The journal failed; no one was interested. People turn away their faces; they don’t want to know. How many times have you heard “I don’t want to get involved.”

The Explosion

I am no prophet, but I detect the hand of Providence in all this to purify a church which had grown corrupt. It was a unique moment: the internet had begun to make information available, but had not yet destroyed newspapers. Newspapers still had the resources to conduct such a massive investigation. The editor of the Globe was an outsider, who was willing to upset the apple cart. Judge Sweeney ruled to release the personnel files of abusive priests. The American justice system is one of the most open in the world and unlike European courts does not place the protection of the privacy of criminals higher than the public’s right to know. The 9/11 attack had awakened the American public to the fragility of existence and the working of dark forces.

The Globe’s work set off first a national and then an international investigation and reform which is still going on. Some progress has been made, but even in the United States some bishops still play games to protect abusers. Outside of the United States bishops are largely clueless. In Germany convicted abuser priests work in parishes. The third world thinks it has bigger problems than abusive priests.

The world will never be perfect, but thanks to the work of reporters, it has changed in one respect for the better. Some children will not be abused, they will not grow up with ruined lives and commit suicide slowly or quickly.

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Pope Francis was visited by George Weigel last week, so it is no surpise that his statements yesterday on the abuse crisis mimick Weigel’s ideological views of the crisis: holiness is what was lacking; abuse is greater among the laity; we are getting blamed unjustly for a common problem; Benedict was at the forefront of the reform.
You, Leon, and so many other reformers have rebutted these false notions with hard facts, which continue to get pushed under the tide of high rhetoric.
Yes, there are slightly more pedophiles among laity than priests but pederasty (abuse of adolescent boys) by priests, which is the main problem, has been at a rate Sipe proved to be between 9% and up to 40% in some urban settings.

Sadly, Pope Benedict only acted under pressure, and after years of knowing the truth, and allowing, for example, Maciel to continue to abuse. I believe his brave stepping aside was in recognition of his failure and the moral impossibility of his leading any reform. It is example all must follow who betrayed children. It will be Francis’ fate if he does not act decisively.

Yes, holiness was lacking. But the kind of “holiness” which insists on couping men up together for years in seminary, without possibility of marriage, leads to situational homophilia with lifelong tendencies to be attracted to boys, if ex-Legionnaires’ accounts can be believed.

The Church has not been singled out. With over 4,000 creditable accused pederast priests in the US alone, the enormity of the diabolical infestation is almost unimaginable. In addition, known pederast cardinals and bishops remain in power, and are well known by the pope. His failure to remove them is aiding and abetting their continued abuse of children. If he thinks telling them to stop is sufficient, he should consult his chief demonologists.

The Pope struggles to appoint his abuse commission because, I believe, he realizes the clerical experts who now claim to be architects of reform were themselves minions in the original cover-up.

The crisis is far from over. Sick priests are still permitted to remain priests under insufficent supervision. Child protection measures being foisted on bishops conferences worldwide are a smoke screen to avoid addressing this horror.

True experts need to be consulted if the pope has any chance of coming out of the brainwashing that has deeply affected Church leadership on the topic. Leaders such as you, Leon, and Richard Sipe, and Jason Barry. The Pope should hold a private summit with reformer experts to educate himself first, including the real anatomy of the ring of abusers and abettors that exists under his nose, and continue to advise him.

Most importantly, he must establish a truth and justice commission, trying in court any bishop who moved priests around and through whose actions children continued and continue to be molested.

The Pope bemoans the lack of generative bishops. No honest priest will step forward to be bishop to support the continued practices they know will burden them with living a lie. There is no generativity possible without placing the protection of children before everything else. If that means most of the bishops in the Church must step down, then so be it. God will raise up 7000 more. The Church was reduced to a handful of clerics during times of heresy. This is the heresies of gnosticism, Jansenism and angelism writ large. Cleansing the house of the Lord must be complete now, or the enemies of the Church will do it later with violence. I believe the persecution of Christians has so increased because of contempt issuing from a crisis clearly not addressed.

The Pope must learn what he does not know. If not, his papacy will be for naught.

Weigel has not uttered the three words that, I am told, women love to hear: I was wrong.

Benedict did more than any pope in centuries to deal with abuse, but it was not enough.

Francis is a fixer. Whenever a parish or diocese experience a disaster, a fixer is sent in, as O’Malley was to Boston. Francis is the papal fixer. He is changing the subject from sexual abuse by his charm, hominess, and willingness to let people indulge their minor vices without a censoring voice from the clergy.

A fixer differs from a reformer in that a fixer does not address the roots; he is not radical. He merely papers over the problem, merely puts a poultice on the cancer.

Karadima is a terribly abusive priest in Chile. The archbishop of Santiago told him to stop saying mass in Public. Karadima ignored the order, and photos of him saying mass were tweeted to tens of thousands of people.

A prominent Chilean priest who was ordered by the Vatican to never again celebrate a public Mass as punishment for sexually abusing altar boys has been photographed apparently defying the order.

Chile’s top church leaders confirmed the Rev. Fernando Karadima’s act of insubordination Friday and sent the case to the Vatican for investigation. The photos were taken Dec. 4, but they were only released this week by Juan Carlos Cruz, a journalist and one of Karadima’s victims.

“It’s a very painful situation that shows that this priest continues to do as he pleases,” Cruz told The Associated Press. “It’s a slap in the face for the victims of his abuse. He should be in jail but instead he’s still being protected by the church.”

The Roman Catholic Church retains a firm grip on Chilean society, although in recent years its influence has waned after scandals in which priests have been accused of molesting children. Victims say Karadima began abusing them at his residence at the Sacred Heart of Jesus church in Santiago about 20 years ago, when they were between 14 and 17 years old.

The Vatican sanctioned Karadima by ordering him to a life of “penitence and prayer” in 2011. He was also barred from celebrating Mass in public, from hearing confessions or offering spiritual direction and from having contact with his ex-parishioners. A Chilean judge later dismissed a criminal case because the statute of limitations had expired, but she determined the abuse allegations were truthful.

The timing of the photos’ release appeared aimed at embarrassing both the current and former archbishops of Santiago, who were in Rome for Saturday’s ceremony to name current Archbishop Ricardo Ezzati Andrello a cardinal.

The victims in Chile say the retired archbishop, Cardinal Francisco Javier Errazuriz, failed to act on accusations that they were abused by Karadima, who was long one of the country’s most popular priests. They say the cardinal declined to even meet them.

Pope Francis’s response: he made Archbishop Ricardo Ezzati Andrello a cardinal. This sends a clear message. The Vatican does not care how a bishop handles sexual abuse cases.

Francis has not appointed the sexual abuse commission he promised. I will be flabbergasted if he appoints anyone like Tom Doyle or Richard Sipe, someone who knows the problem from the inside. The Voice of the Faithful here in Naples asked me to go to Boston to speak to O’Malley about Southwest Florida’s being a dumping ground for abusive priests (El Paso has a similar problem). I had to inform them that the mere mention of my name had reduced a cardinal to screaming fits (I guess I should be flattered). I was blackballed by my pastor from the Knights of Malta because I criticized bishops.

The caliber of members of review boards has declined, because bishops want only those who will say that everything is OK, that a bishop never makes a mistake.

The Roman Catholic Church claims that outside the church there is no salvation and that apostasy leads to eternal damnation. It encourages its members to confide their deepest secrets and inmost sins to a priest. It therefore has a far stronger obligation than any other organization or church to ensure that its clergy are of sterling character. After Augustine approved of the civil measures to force Donatists to become Catholics, he also insisted that Catholic clergy give the highest example of probity and that corrupt priests be disciplined and removed from the clergy.

But little or nothing will be done unless there is a crisis as serious as the Reformation, and even then reform was only partly implemented. Bishops have allowed priests with criminal convictions for abuse to serve in ministry, and are still trying to hide abusers. The Vatican deeply does not care. Only external pressure will force the hierarchy to act, and then they will act only grudgingly and minimally. Francis will canonize John Paul II, who refused to act on abuse and who called the psychopathic incestuous child molester Maciel “an efficacious guide to youth.” Bishops will notice that tolerating child molestation does not prevent canonization, so it can’t be all that serious a matter.

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Pope Francis has called for a decentralization of the Church. But that is no cure for many of its problems, especially of serious ones like sexual abuse. The Anglican Church as a decentralized structure which makes it difficult to act, at least according to Archbishop Aspinall, the Anglican Primate of Australia.

Like Catholic Cardinal, George Pell, Primate Aspinall is keen to remind anyone who will listen, that he is not like a CEO of his church, in that he has no power over his apparent underlings. Aspinall has so little power, that he has called on the commission to recommend that the government pass laws to force his church to be more humane towards its victims, through a national compensation system.

“I think, in terms of the Anglican Church, it would be much quicker and simpler for us if that were imposed on us from outside. And then dioceses wouldn’t fall into the trap that Grafton did in terms of focusing on financial matters to the detriment of victims. They would simply be given a determination by a statutory body and required to find the money,” Aspinall said.

He felt that it would be essentially impossible for the Anglican Church to set up such a fund, because it would require agreement from all 23 dioceses. Agreement was unlikely, because, as he poetically put it, “Anglican politics makes federal politics look like kindergarten.” Members of the Church would “take a dim view” of having to sell property to raise cash for victim compensation and assistance.

Anglicans, with a married clergy and female bishop, can be as hard-hearted as Catholic celibate males. The clergy of both churches also same attitude to money: it is the lifeblood of the church.

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Rod Dreher has an essay in Time about why he left the Catholic Church. The immediate case for his discontent was the failure of the Church to preach repentance, and its long-time toleration of sexual abuse by the clergy.

He adds in his column the essential reason (which should have been in the essay) – that he no longer believes the ecclesiological claims of the Roman Catholic Church – that is, that to be saved it is necessary to be subject to the jurisdiction of the Roman pontiff.

Things could be much worse that Dreher portrays (and they have been much worse in the past) but if one believes the claims of the Roman Catholic Church, the problems in the Church would not affect one’s membership in it.

I sympathize with the Orthodox criticism of Roman legalism and juridicism. The fact that so many bishops have degrees in canon law is a bad sign. Canon law is like the traffic code: necessary and useful, but it should not be the central focus of study for a pastor.

Repentance has never been popular, although it is the first word that is addressed to us: Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand. Instead we are repeatedly told God loves you as you are. This is true, but inadequate. We also need to be told Go and sin no more.

The Jesuits attacked the Jansenist clergy. A Jansenist priest was not content with hearing a list of sins and then giving absolution. He wanted the penitent to see the deep reality of sin within himself. Such a priest would often refuse absolution until the penitent had demonstrated that he had wrestled with the deep reality of sin and alienation from God that affects even the baptized Christian.

Father Ruff criticized Dreher:

The author pins sex abuse to lax, feel-good Christianity after Vatican II. This is tendentious and unsupported by fact – for example, the fact that so much abuse also happened in the 1950s and 1940s and before. The causes of sex abuse are many; one of them is an overly authoritarian power system, coupled with such undue respect for religious authority that victims aren’t believed and media won’t publish such “scandalous” reports. These tendencies were much stronger in the “good old days.” The looseness of the 60s and 70s certainly caused lots of problems in behavior – but even here, clergy coped so poorly with the new freedoms in part because the old system didn’t prepare them for it and stunted their maturation. It’d be helpful if the author tried to look at the complexities of such issues, instead of using conservative ideology to twist a few facts in his direction.

Ruff is correct in that the problems precede the 1960s. Too often a priest would confess something like I abused thirty boys and two committed suicide and the confessor would tell him to say seven Hail Marys and give him absolution, and the bishop would transfer the abuser to another parish.

As I have mentioned in previous blogs, Evangelical Christians in Latin America seem to have more success than Catholics do in bringing about true conversions. In part it is because they demand repentance, and that word and concept have evaporated in the Catholic Church.

Even before the 1960s, repentance was too often reduced to a mechanical fulfillment of the canonical requirements for confession, rather than a search for the deeply rooted evils in our nature and a desire to have them purged and our natures transformed by the searing and healing light of Christ.

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Too many Christians have the idea that all you need to do to be saved is be basically good or at least well-intentioned. They have a week grasp on the holiness of God and the infinite distance between divine holiness and natural man at his best.

As a corollary to this attitude, there are acceptable and non-acceptable sins. Acceptable sins are the sins that normal middle class people commit, such as fornication and adultery. More expansive people extend it to underclass sins, such as murder.

But almost everyone draws the line at genocide and child abuse.

What people have a hard time grasping (and I include myself) is that Christ came to die for sinners, including the worst of sinners.

Catholics pray for the living and the dead. Purgatory is a specifically western Catholic doctrine, but Protestants with whom I have discussed it say that the equivalent Protestant doctrine is standing before the judgment seat of God after death, and seeing the full truth of one’s life and of God’s attitude to it.

After the attacks pf 9/11. I couldn’t bring myself to pray for the attackers, although they needed prayers more than anyone else. I prayed for all the dead. When I did the Camino, each day prayed for the victims of sexual abuse and for the abusers – and that was a hard prayer to make.

As part of their prayers for the dead, Catholics have masses said for the deceased. The mass is not meant to honor the deceased (as idea that has taken hold at funeral masses) but to pray for them as they come before the judgment seat of God.

In Franco’s Spain (and perhaps today) masses are said for the repose of the soul of Adolf Hitler – and if anyone needs prayer, he does. A mass is being offered for the terrible abuser, Cardinal Groër. He had homoerotic contact with almost very student he can in contact with, perhaps a thousand , perhaps more. His case has devastated the church in Austria, and still causes trouble:

VIENNA – Reacting to criticism, an Austrian bishop says he has changed his mind and will not attend a memorial Mass for a cardinal accused of molesting young boys.

Agidius Zsifkovics, the bishop of Eisenstadt, was to participate in Monday’s Mass marking the 10th anniversary of the death of Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer. But Zsifkovics says he decided not to “after numerous encounters and discussions over the past days.”

Groer stepped down as archbishop of Vienna in 1995 after former theological students accused him of sexual abuse.

After Zsifkovics initially said he would attend the service, a statement on the website of “Those Affected by Churchly Abuse” late last month accused him of planning to honour a man who left “a trail of spiritual destruction.”

I don’t know what was the intention of Bishop Zsifkovics; but masses are said – or at least should be said – not to honor the deceased but to pray for him, a sinner. And the worst sinners need the most prayers.

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I recently read Daniel Quinn’s novel After Dachau. It is a cleverly done piece of alternate history: its premise (warning – spoiler!) is that the Nazis won the war, but the reader does not realize this until he is well into the novel.

I won’t go into all the details, but we learn that time dated A.D., After Dachau, where the great hero Adolf Hitler defeated the Jews.

Someone discovers what really happened, and tries to alert people. But what he learns for his pains is that NO ONE CARES.

I often feel that way about the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. A handful of people do care, but the Vatican realizes that even in the developed world, very few care, and the typical Catholic is a South American or African peasant who has not even heard of the sexual abuse crisis, and in any case is facing problems even more urgent, such as starvation, massacres, and persecution.

Pope Francis may say the right things – after all, who will defend child molestation? – but will he do the right thing? His record in Argentina does not look promising.

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The election of Jorge Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, was somewhat of a surprise, although it should not have been, because he seems to have been the runner-up in the last papal election,, coming in second after Ratzinger.

A few thoughts:

From all reports he is dedicated to the poor and leads a simple, austere life. He wants to seek out the most wounded and despised members of society. He is fiercely orthodox in his denunciations of abortion and gay marriage.

His record as Jesuit superior during Argentina’s dirty war has been questioned. Leftist terrorism in the1970s was designed to provoke a crack-down which would provoke a revolution. The leftists got the crackdown, but not the revolution, and the military executed 30,000 victims. Bergoglio remained publicly silent, although he seems to have helped some victims.

What can one infer about his character from this public silence? It is hard to say. He may have had trouble understanding what was going on and uncertain about how to proceed. I think one can say that he does not seek out confrontation, even when provoked.

What does all this mean for the church?

His embrace of the despised may include abusers and enablers of abusers in the Church; he just visited Cardinal Law.

He may ignore the Curia and concentrate on the horrendous problems of the Catholic poor. The typical Catholic, we forget, is a South American or African peasant. These people face starvation, oppression, disease, and grinding poverty. If he concentrates on these problems he will be praised, and he may ignore sexual abuse and the corruption in the Church administration that has enabled it, viewing it as a minor problem compared to what the poor are suffering throughout the world.

That may have been the intention of the Italian cardinals, who are happy with the way the Curia functions and thinks that all the fuss about sexual abuse is Anglo-American Puritanism.

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Just when you think that the bureaucrats at the Vatican cannot do anything stupider than they’ve done before, they manage do outdo themselves:

One of the domain names of a website that is the primary source of information on clergy sex abuse cases has been blocked on the Vatican’s web servers.

Users on Vatican servers who try to access one of the four web addresses for Bishopaccountability.org, which tracks publicly available information on clergy accused of abuse, are told the page has been blocked because of “Hate/Racism.”

A Vatican spokesman said the site may be blocked because of an automatic filter system that checks words that appear on websites for explicit nature or inappropriateness.

————–

Bishopaccountability.org, which is a non-profit corporation in the U.S. state of Massachusetts, is run by a staff of two located in the Boston area.

A staple of those researching the decades-long clergy sex abuse crisis, the site includes links to reporting on abuse since the 1980s, a database of accused abusers throughout the U.S., testimonies of abuse survivors, and court documents from lawsuits and criminal prosecutions across the U.S.

Among its activities in the past year, the site has:

*Made available more than 8,500 pages of material detailing claims of sexual abuse by a group of Franciscan priests and brothers in California, after their court-ordered release in May 2012;

*Provided a detailed timeline of the witness testimonies and evidence in the trial of Msgr. William Lynn, a former official in the Philadelphia archdiocese who was found guilty in June 2012 of endangering children during his time at the archdiocese from 1992-2004, and;

*Given background information on the release of some 12,000 files documenting Cardinal Roger Mahony and the Los Angeles’ archdiocese’s handling of abuse cases in the 1980s, following the files’ court ordered release in February 2013;

“This Web site is dedicated to the survivors and their families and loved ones,” the site states on its “About us” page.

Access to one of the site’s four addresses was prevented by the web service provided in Paul VI Audience Hall, a facility the Vatican has provided for use by reporters during the papal transition.

I helped BishopAccountability get started. It has hundreds of thousands of pages of documents which are being organized and put on the web. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

What the Vatican bureaucrats at all levels do not yet realize is that the web makes secrecy almost impossible. Their idiocies will be broadcast world-wide, so they might as well do the right thing.

Any attempts to suppress the web will fail, and will only give wider publicity to their mistakes:

WHAT THE VATICAN DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW!

It used to be said, O that mine enemy would write a book! Now it can be said, O that mine enemy would try to block my web site!

(PS: The excuse that it was blocked accidentally does not hold water. If it had been blocked because of sexual content – understandable – it would have said BLOCKED BECAUSE OF SEXUAL CONTENT, not HATE/RACISM. Maybe Cardinal Mahony’s delicate sensibilities were offended.)

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Several people here and elsewhere have criticized Archbishop Gomez, He has been in charge of the Los Angles archdiocese for two years – why did he wait until now to do anything, as Mahony himself asked.

My guess is that events passed something like this:

When Gomez began archbishop, it took him a while to assimilate what had happened. He had enormous new duties as archbishop, the paper trail ran to tens of thousands of pages, and the leftover staff from Mahony’s years was not in a hurry to point out how compromising the documents were.

When Gomez realized what had happened, he knew he had to do two things: release the documents and rebuke Mahony.

They had to be done simultaneously.

He could not release the documents without rebuking Mahony – that is clear.

He could not rebuke Mahoney without releasing the documents, because Mahony and his defenders would claim that Gomez’ s actions were not justified by the evidence.

But he could not rebuke Mahony publicly without getting the Vatican’s consent – and that would take time and negotiation.

In the meanwhile he had to let the lawyers continue their legal maneuvers so that the documents would not be released without a simultaneous rebuke of Mahony.

As soon as he had Vatican consent, Gomez released the documents and rebuked Mahony – that is all that Gomez himself could do.

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I once asked a patristics scholar how Jerome, the translator of the Bible into Latin, ever got canonized. He was a nasty, cruel man. The scholar replied that in those days Saint meant “someone important in the Church.” And not only in those days.

John Paul grievously mishandled the cases of sexual abuse in the Church. Priests and at least one cardinal (Schoenborn) pleaded with him to do something, and he refused. Children committed suicide because of abuse that John Paul’s failures and willful blindness allowed to continue. And now he is Blessed John Paul and soon will be Saint John Paul.

Why?

Poland.

Poland is the last Catholic country in Europe and what John Paul did to help bring down Communism eclipses for the Poles everything else he did or failed to do.

Cardinal Mahony, who served from 1985 until 2011, when he reached mandatory retirement, has faced calls for his defrocking over his handling of the abuse cases for years. But the cardinal, a vocal champion of immigrant rights, remained hugely popular with Latinos here, who make up 40 percent of the four million parishioners in the archdiocese.

Catholics of European descent are leaving the Catholic Church in the U.S. About a third have left, at the same rate as the dying Episcopal Church is experiencing. But Latinos are replenishing the ranks of Catholics, and Mahony because of his politics is still a hero to them. Therefore the Vatican will do nothing to Mahony. Prosecutors in Los Angeles also take politics into account, and I doubt they will go after Mahony.

Law has been hounded by the media and Catholics around the world, but his strongest defenders have been local minorities. Last month, dozens of Hispanic supporters chanting in support of Law on the front steps of the cathedral faced harsh words from protesters.

”It hurts me so much,” Sanchez said yesterday afternoon while sitting in a pew in the Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in East Boston. ”I was never in favor of him stepping down.”

Like many immigrants, especially those from Latin America, Sanchez remained supportive of Law even as the clergy sexual abuse scandal triggered a tidal wave of demands for his resignation.

He knows Law made grave mistakes, and he’s sickened by the thought of priests sexually abusing children, but he said he can’t allow himself to be angry at Law. He said that only through forgiveness can people really heal. Above that, though, he said it’s impossible to dislike a man who has done so much good for others – especially Latinos.

For them, ”el cardenal,” holds a special place in their hearts.

When Hurricane Mitch pummeled Honduras and Nicaragua in 1998, Law raised more than $1.5 million to help families there. When earthquakes ravaged El Salvador and Colombia in 2001, ”el cardenal” again went into action.

In fluent Spanish, Law has consoled Latino parishioners when they needed it. The cardinal speaks lovingly of his birthplace: Mexico City.

While some people may question the strong support expressed by many immigrants, the Rev. Robert Hennessey, pastor of Most Holy Redeemer, said it makes perfect sense.

”They have great capacity to forgive,” Hennessey said. ”They have a different view.”

He likens that view to how families handle a crisis at home: ”When you have a loving father that did something wrong, he’s still your loving father.”

Cardinal Mahoney has been revealed as an enabler and protector of pedophiles. He has long been a champion of Hispanics.

In his long tenure in the nation’s largest archdiocese, Cardinal Mahony, now 76, distinguished himself as a keen politician in both civic and church circles. He was an early champion of Hispanic immigrants, marching with César Chávez, the founder of the United Farm Workers of America, and is beloved by many Hispanics, who make up 70 percent of the four million Catholics in the archdiocese.

Los Angeles Hispanics are conflicted but still supportive:

“Roger Mahony will continue to be my friend. But reading all this stuff, it breaks my heart,” said Antonia Hernandez, an immigrant rights activist who’s worked with Mahony since he was a bishop in Stockton in the late 1970s. “Here are these people he spent his whole life protecting from abuse and when he could do something about it, he didn’t.”

But Hernandez, the president and chief executive of the California Community Foundation, a leading philanthropic organization, said Mahony did too much for immigrants for his achievements to be dismissed, saying: “His affinity for the immigrant community, the farmworker, is genuine and real.”

Stockholm syndrome, orcapture-bonding, is apsychologicalphenomenon in whichhostagesexpressempathy,sympathyand have positive feelings towards their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them. These feelings are generally considered irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims, who essentially mistake a lack ofabusefrom their captors for an act of kindness.[1][2]TheFBI‘s Hostage Barricade Database System shows that roughly 27% of victims show evidence of Stockholm syndrome.[3]

Stockholm syndrome can be seen as a form oftraumatic bonding, which does not necessarily require a hostage scenario, but which describes “strong emotional ties that develop between two persons where one person intermittently harasses, beats, threatens, abuses, or intimidates the other.”[4]One commonly used hypothesis to explain the effect of Stockholm syndrome is based on Freudian theory. It suggests that the bonding is the individual’s response to trauma in becoming a victim. Identifying with the aggressor is one way that the ego defends itself. When a victim believes the same values as the aggressor, they no longer become a threat.[5]

The abuser keeps the victim off guard by acts of kindness mixed with acts of abuse. Mahoney championed farm workers as he let his priests rape their children. Hispanics are conflicted and uncertain how to respond.

I know there are some Hispanics who read this blog. What do you think?